Books by Jerry W. Ward Jr.
Trouble the Water
(1997) /
Black Southern Voices (1992) /
The Richard Wright Encyclopedia (2008) /
The Katrina Papers
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August 18-20, 2006: Returning to the
Sources
By Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
Some days I feel like a helium balloon one second before
the string connects it with the earth.
Compromised freedom has become a
major issue in my country since the Supreme Court
elected George W. Bush, since 9/11 became the debatable
icon of the twenty-first century, since Hurricane
Katrina became the name of our national tragedy. We who
believe that the United States is the most perfect
example in history of what a democracy should be have an
enormous problem of explaining to outsiders why suddenly
certain freedoms are "unavailable"—unavailable
for them and us. Nor is it easy to explain to an
outsider why power is a glass tiger. The outsider
believes that American citizens, whatever their status,
can save the world, or whatever portion of the world the
outsider lives in. She or he absolutely refuses to
believe that we Americans are not omnipotent, that we
can shatter.
I shall blame my friend Kalamu ya
Salaam for leading me down a straight-crooked New
Orleans street and leaving me in explanatory
difficulties. I had to explain the fragility of power as
I talked this afternoon to a young man from Angola who
lives in Zambia.
We—Kalamu,
Mahmud Rahman, and I—are
supposed to be on our way to an African dinner and
pleasant conversation. Instead, Kalamu turns off St.
Bernard Avenue onto North Dorgenois and parks near Mama
D's house/home/headquarters in the Seventh Ward.
Mama D (Dyan French Cole) is a force
to be reckoned with. People who know what the official
mass media is not reporting about New Orleans know that.
She is an organizer. She has been called a matriarch.
"Matriarch" sounds like an anthropological misnomer used
by folks who don't know how to talk about Africans and
African-descended people. As far as I am concerned, she
is just a brave and ordinary woman who is capable of
doing extraordinary things. She organizes life in her
neighborhood and calls attention to how disorganized the
political leadership of New Orleans is. Call her name
and elected officials seek shelter in weird platitudes.
She is a very active member of Families and Friends of
Louisiana's Incarcerated Children (FFLIC), a
truth-teller. She did not flee in the face of Hurricane
Katrina. She stayed and got harassed by the military,
FEMA, the first and second responders as she tried and
continues to try to make her neighborhood livable. She
did not wait until the Women of the Storm went to
Congress to do the right thing; her efforts were
prototypes for what the women wanted to do. Media mavens
pretend she and genuine grassroots efforts do not exist.
I think Kalamu wants Mahmud and me to
be witnesses.
Mama D has known Kalamu for a long
time. She smiles as she welcomes the odd people, Mahmud
and me. She has been examining a box of photographs of
the neighborhood with a friend, pictures that have to be
used in a report. A young African man who is wearing
fatigue pants, a fatigue cap, and a National Baptist
something-or-other t-shirt is sitting on one of the
stump-chairs near the sidewalk. He rises and shakes
hands with us. I tell Mama D that people in New York
were quite impressed with what she said at the Shabazz
Conversation last fall. She nods and gives me some
intriguing details about that trip, then informs all of
us about her current work, the Japanese newspeople who
have documented it, theVietnamese shopkeepers down the
block and their fronting for the drug traffic, the
volunteer she sent back to Jerusalem and the other
volunteer she helped to rescue from Lebanon, how the
City Council is playing games with voting districts and
people's lives, and . . . "Hey, now" she goes to greet
one of her sisters who has just driven up.
I ask the young man where he is from.
"Africa." I already knew. His face, his body build, his
accent said that. "No. I mean which part. I would guess
East Africa." His expression changes quickly. "I'm from
southern Africa. I think of Africa as one country.
Originally, I am from Angola but I live in Zambia. I
have a lot of property there." I tell him it is
important to be specific about nations or countries.
Given what I have to teach students, it is very
important to prevent their overlooking details and
inventing a continent as a single country. He is
undaunted. He has dreams of unification despite
neo-colonialism. Bursting with idealism and optimism he
lectured me on the crucial role that African Americans
have in saving the continent of Africa.
An African man is trying to shave my
soul, to convert me to his belief that if we pray, God
will answer our prayers and allow Africa to become a
country rather than a death-friendly continent.
The man is afflicted with the
missionary disease. There are some prayers that God
refuses to answer, and no doubt God has legitimate godly
reasons for remaining silent.
We do agree on one thing. The world
should have rushed to help Robert G. Mugabe appropriate
all the arable land in Zimbabwe and restore it to the
people so they would be able to feed themselves and
minimize the domination of the Other, the post-colonial
Other. After all, the then superpowers of the world did
not hesitate to help Zionists appropriate Israel in the
late 1940s. If we can not avoid having injustice,
injustice should be equally distributed.
I have to explain to this young man
what I am sure he understands better than I. The
destruction of the Organization of African Unity and its
displacement by Africa Union has left Africans at the
mercy of the International Monetary Fund and other
neocolonial powers that know Africa is the wealthiest
continent on the earth and that Africans are peoples who
allow their freedoms to be compromised by their leaders
and by their deep belief in the human. The image is
vulgar because what is happening in 2006 on the
continent of Africa is vulgar and obscene. And all the
blame cannot be attributed to the European white man. We
can not entertain that fib to absolve ourselves of
shared guilt.
Truth is an adult who does not sit in
a playpen with stupidity. Some of the blame is carried
by the Arabs, the Muslims and devotees of Islam, who
live north of the Sahara and who commit vicious acts of
genocide. Some of the blame is festering in American
foreign policy. Some of the blame is carried, I tell the
young man, by the people from the Middle East, who
brought Islam and slavery to a wide swath of his beloved
continent, who own the best stores in Dakar and the best
seats on the OPEC Board. And soon blame will be carried
by the Chinese and their Indian comrades. Read the
current trade agreements and treaties. Listen to
treason.
Is this young African man a daemonic
agent come to test my sanity? He is forcing me to
preview the script for the destruction of Africa in the
twenty-first century. The bad dream he has given me of
reality is much too painful. It has all the colors and
tones of the slave gospel. He is making me wish to wipe
Man and Woman from the face of the earth. Do he and I
have the same impersonal interest in secular salvation?
the same personal Savior? Richard Wright shoots words
through my mind. "Man, God Ain't Like That." Can I
unbrand the scars inside the young African man's head?
Can he batter down the prisonhouse time has erected in
my own?
I look very deeply into the ancient
eyes of the young man. My gaze has to hack its way
through a lot of tall missionary grass to reach the
clearing. It is night, but the clearing is brightly lit
by the splintered stars that were once the teeth of
President Juvenal Habyarimana. The clearing is huge. My
eyes sweep across the thousands upon thousands of
crucified Hutsi [Hutu + Tutsi]. The signs tacked at the
top of each cross read: IN GOD WE TRUSTED.
Here be genocide. The Rwanda
genocide. 1994. The names have been erased from the
stories and buried. Ethnicity has reshuffled history a
thousand times and the narratives are not entitled. Not
entitled to be entitled. It must be the season of the
witch. Smashed heads, amputated legs and arms, a
ginger-colored finger, a nailed foot, raped and
sodomized bodies that will not rot—all
these bit and pieces of humanity hang on the crosses.
The blinding bright eyes of the dead children stare
accusations at me. My ears consume cruel
French-inflected African laughter. All I can smell is
the stench of repetitions orchestrated by the World
Bank, the IMF, Africa Union. I am not devastated. I am
demolished, shattered.
He tries to read the writing inside
my head. I can feel him turning the pages, puzzling to
decipher my handwriting. I tell him that African
Americans and Africans have yet to resolve their
self-hatred and death-desires, their class and
ideological divisions. Perhaps in time we shall. Several
hundred more years. We can cooperate and become kinsmen
once more. We must first have separate resolutions for
local problems. We must remember that the local is
knotted with the universal. These are not problems on
which either Africans or African Americans have a
monopoly. These are the problems of contemporary Man and
Woman, world problems. My young African brother and I
are glass tigers, just like all the conflicted wretches
of the Earth, and we can not help the entire continent
of Africa any more than the Italians and the Italian
Americans can help the entire continent of Europe. I
look at the man’s face with tough love. He must go home
and help with improving Zambia. I must stay in New
Orleans and help with improving Louisiana. We can only
help one another by embracing the power of fire. "I
believe," I tell him, "in the match." He manages to
agree with that veiled message. He and I know that the
fires burning now do not belong to us.
Our separate worlds must burn time
with our own fires before unification occurs.
When shall we succeed in teaching our
children that they must love themselves enough not to
kill the people in their towns, townships, and ghettoes
or "hoods"—the
people who are themselves? When shall we African
Americans teach them to love the hair God gave them
enough not to make the Koreans, who are only too willing
to help them ruin the hair, very wealthy? Or, as Mama D
told us earlier this afternoon, she recently had to cuss
out a young sister who cut off her beautiful African
hair and replaced with the tail hair of inferior Asian
horses. Extensions of African retentions.
The young man believes that if a
sufficient number of African Americans left the United
States and took all their consumer power with them to
Africa (and he was not specific about the destinations
of the immigrants) , then the world economy would change
and Africa would profit. Dreams. The young man is full
of naďve dreams. His understanding of world politics is
a calculated innocence. I do not want him to become a
part of our benign genocide. I want him to live. He is
helping me to understand much, much better Richard
Wright’s Black Power and its multiple levels of
significance; he is helping me to understand the
emotional well from which Wright’s anger came when he
visited the Gold Coast in 1953.
The Africans in various lands that
have all the wrong boundaries will have to first heal
themselves and their ancient ethnic hatreds and reset
boundaries before they can call upon African Americans
for help. And the help, I warn my young brother, will be
long in arriving. We are too busy with trying to regain
our compromised freedoms in the United States, for we
laid our matches down and they got wet.
When the young man hops in his van
and drives off to yet another mission, I come back to
the late afternoon sunlight, to New Orleans and North
Dorgenois, to Mama D, Kalamu, and Mahmud. I glue all the
shattered pieces of me together, knowing that I have
been to the sources. I am starving for dinner at
Bennachin.
It was destined that Mahmud Rahman
should have heard parts of the African / African
American dialogue. He, Kalamu, and I are all actors in
this post-Katrina performance. He grew up in Bangladesh
and now lives in Oakland, Ishmael Reed territory. He is
a journalist and fiction writer who knows much about the
United States and its ethnic problems. According to his
webpage, he is very much interested in "the metaphor of
water as the agency of escape, life, death, and
reflection." He is in New Orleans, I am sure, to see how
the metaphor of water plays its music here. He is on his
long trip to home, traveling deeper into writing a novel
set in contemporary Bangladesh. After dinner, I assure
him the critics will love his novel. They are mad for
the postcolonial. I hope Mahmud will come to New Orleans
again. I would really enjoy having a conversation with
him about the sources and compromised freedoms.
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posted 21 August 2006
